Christ's experience of God

Introduction

I know Frank Decker. It is a privilege to know him, but I can hardly call it a distinction. I am only one of several thousand millionaires and ministers and mulligans, of Pharisees and first citizens and tramps, of sinners and publicans and outcasts of various sorts who have the right to stand up in the streets of Providence at his side and say "I know you." Anybody can know Decker, provided, of course, that he is in trouble or need. If he has no troubles he may have to wait outside a while until Decker gets through. They that are well need no physician but they that are sick.

Many men write lives of Jesus — how many you never know until you look at the book catalogues. But Decker has lived a life of Jesus first and written it afterwards: and that, as you will agree I think, is something entirely different.

You have heard the phrase, the "heart of a

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city," by which is generally meant the city's center, the spot where the street cars are thickest and the noise and dust are worst. The city of Providence has a real heart. It is Decker's Church House, which stands down-town in the center of things on an almost respectable street, its door wide open to everyone. It's the business of a good, hard-working heart to center in itself all the sympathy and love of the organism; and the Church House has pretty nearly succeeded in doing that for Providence. Drop into the current of the city's traffic anywhere a lonely human being in search of help and he may drift about for a time, but before night he will have found Decker; you may be sure of that. The first policeman he speaks to will direct him, or the first conductor or fruit peddler. And Decker, who may have seen a hundred or two just like him already, will have the same big smile for him and will help to do up his bundle of worry and pack it away with the thousand and one similar bundles that have been left at the Church House and never called for.

It was ten years or more ago that Decker

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— by the way, his name is Rev. Frank H. — began to work out the idea of his Church House. He was pastor of a Congregational church in Providence at the time, and happy with his job, but not altogether satisfied. It struck him that he was only partly doing the things that Jesus of Nazareth had done. Jesus, for instance, took care of the sick. Decker had no facilities or opportunity for that. Jesus had made his home with the poor and given them the help they needed. He had been a sort of First Aid to everybody who needed him in the cities where he went. Especially his fondness was for the publicans and sinners. Decker envied him those publicans and sinners more than anything else. Somehow he couldn't seem to get at enough of them through his regular church work to make any showing at all. It made him restless; he wanted to put himself in a place where he could have a chance to do all the things that Jesus had done, where he could really touch every needy life in the city with the spirit of real active love. He wanted to show that love works.

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It wasn't to be a united charities organization, nor a social settlement, nor any religious work with the religion left out. Decker had watched the efforts of such organizations for years, and while he sympathized with them, he found them wanting. In his Bible reading he is a revised versionist. That is, he thinks that when Paul wrote "the greatest of these is charity," he really meant "love." He has an idea that if John had intended to say, "God so card indexed the world," or "God so analyzed the case of the world," or "God so investigated the world," instead of "God so loved the world," it would have been printed that way. So he opened up a couple of rooms in an inadequate sort of a house and let it be known that any one who needed help of any sort, or comfort or sympathy, could come around to him and be loved. That was the idea — charity vitalized and made everlastingly effective by love. He didn't have much money for furnishings, and among the things which he was careful not to spend any of his money on were card catalogues and files and record-books in which to count up the number of his cases.

INTRODUCTION

A half-dozen times every day Decker gets his opportunity to demonstrate that there is a real difference between charity and love; that what the world needs is not so much ham sandwiches as the bread of life; that Jesus with $50,000,000 and an organization behind him couldn't have done as much as Jesus who was never too busy to love.

It took Providence some time to catch the vision of what Decker was doing and planning, but after that he had plenty of help. In his office in the new building now he's really at the center of a web of helpfulness that reaches out to almost every agency in the city. The police are for him; let a man come to them in trouble and they turn him over to Decker. If his trouble is a legal one, Decker passes him on to one of half a dozen lawyers who give their services free to the Church House. If it's sickness, there are some of the biggest physicians in the city who have offered him their service at any time. If it's a case for the city hospital or the poor-farm or the infirmaries, the officers of all of them know Decker and are ready to lend a hand. If it's

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food that's required, Decker knows where to get it. If it's a job. there are a dozen big manufacturers who have offered to take any skilled labor that Decker sends to them; unskilled labor he employs himself in doing the thousand and one odd jobs about the homes of the Church House's friends and supporters.

That's one particularly interesting thing about the Church House, that it co-ordinates all the various helpful agencies of the city. It gives opportimity for service to all kinds of people who really want to do something to help, but haven't the time to limit up their own opportunity. From the four corners of the city folks who need help are poured in upon Decker, and he puts new hearts in them and new hats on them and turns them over to other folks who are ready and willing to give help.

The other interesting tiling about the Church House is that its work is three-quarters self-supporting. The beds and the meals yield a certain revenue, and the men and women who have found new life and hope through Decker come back to reimburse him

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INTRODUCTION

out of their first earnings for the money which the Church House has invested in them.

His is a gruelling day and night task. Just simply to sit back in a chair and receive a hundred men and women a day, to say to each one, "Now, I like you, and we'll see what can be done in your case" — that may be easy enough. But it is not the way Decker does it. He stands all day long in a current of men and women who drift against him with the full force of their dead weight, and all day long he is striving with every atom of will power and heart power that is in him to turn them around, to resurrect their dead spirits, to set them fighting their way back against the current. Jesus, who did the same sort of work, was conscious that power had been drained out of him even when a woman touched the hem of his garment on the street. Decker, at the close of some of his days of unremitting contacts, is about as limp and tired out as a man can be.

But he's proving that love really works. When he had to lock a man up in the city prison the other night he told the poor fellow,

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even as he closed the door on him, that it was an act of love. And apparently there must have been something in his voice that rang true, because a grimy hand was pushed out through the bars to take his, and the man inside said, "Thank you, Mr. Decker." Things like that please Decker. They are the recompense that he gets for the long, tired, trying days. They are his encouragement to go on with the job of being the heart of a city, of making Providence worthy of its name.

It is because I have seen him live that I have wanted to read what he writes. Other lives of Jesus may have been written by men with more degrees after their names, but I venture that none of them carried a higher degree of devotion to Him in their hearts. None of them, I know, have had more publicans and sinners as their friends, have sought with more soul exhausting earnestness to seek and to save that which was lost.

Bruce Barton.

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Foreword

There are many false types of Christianity in the world, as Jesus predicted there would be, and it is of vital importance that their errors be pointed out, that men may not be deceived by them. They may be known by their fruit. So Jesus declared. "Men do not gather figs from thorns." No more can the fruits of genuine Christianity be found connected with any of its perversions. The true Christian life can be lived only by one who has the true Christian religion. The Christian character can be grown only in Christian soil. What now we wish to do is to make clear the vital connection between Christ's faith and his character, which was the fruit of that faith. Jesus reduced his faith to practice. He lived his faith to the full. He trusted it implicitly. It was his meat and his drink. Take away the faith of Christ, and there is nothing significant about the life of Christ. His character was the fruit of his faith, and he declares

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that that faith will produce the same character in everyone who holds it; that that faith will transform every believer into his image, and so into the image of God. The same tree will always bear the same fruit. The real faith of Christ will always enable one to live the life of Christ. We cannot believe what he believed without developing such a character as he developed.

That the character of Christ is above all other characters known on earth is conceded by all those who know him, even by those who do not wholly accept his teaching or believe in the reality of his personal experience of God. The secret of that life does not seem, however, to have been clearly revealed to all who call themselves Christians. Many Christians think of Jesus as the Son of God in a unique way, and therefore regard his character as a unique creation. It does not seem to them to have been developed as other characters are. Perhaps this is the reason that so little real effort has been made to understand how such a character was developed. No greater question can be considered than that of the secret of Jesus,

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FOREWORD

how it was that he was able to develop a character that has commanded the worship of men wherever it has been known, and must vet compel every knee to bow before it.

Some lives of Christ have been written in which his faith and religious experience do not figure at all. As well write a life of Darwin without mentioning evolution or of Marconi without mentioning electricity. The chief significance in the life of Jesus is found in the religion he taught and which he claimed to have experienced. When we come to ask precisely what the religion of Jesus Christ was, which is the only true Christianity, there arises a babel of contradictory voices bewildering the mind of the sincere inquirer.

There is no doubt that Jesus claimed that he enjoyed a personal experience of God. He was sure of the presence of Another with whom he was in direct touch and whom he recognized as his Father. He felt His touch and heard His voice. Jesus did not think of himself as the Father, or as a part of the Father, in any such sense that the Father was not another personality. His Father was not

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his higher self, but another self. There were two wills, his and God's. The God of Jesus was entirely personal. He was another individual. Jesus was in the Father and the Father in him, only as he prayed that other men might be one in God and God in them. The God of Jesus was a Spirit, but a personal Spirit, and the Father of all spirits.

Jesus believed that he experienced God. He was conscious of his personal union with Him. That was his religion. I am not arguing for the reality of such an experience, but simply insisting that the fact be recognized that Jesus claimed it for himself. His experience of God was intimate and enduring, more intimate than his experience of his nearest friends. God was more real to him than his mother. He came nearer to God than to those earthly companions with whom he was most closely associated. He spent whole nights in communion with God; and would often go apart early in the morning to meet Him before he would consent to meet others. Jesus needed no man to help him to realize the presence of God. "I am alone," he said, "and yet

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FOREWORD I am not alone, because the Father is with me."

"Why cannot I follow thee now?" Peter asked his Lord. All the other disciples and friends of Jesus might have asked the same question, for not one of them was able to follow him in his holy life of love. Their failure was wholly due to the fact that as yet they were without their Master's experience of God. The Holy Spirit had not yet come into union with them. They therefore did not understand God's will concerning Jesus, as he understood it. They could not follow him, because they savored not of the things of God, as they are known only by those who are in the Kingdom of God, that is, in personal union with God. They did not share their Lord's aim to be perfect as his Father in Heaven is perfect. How could they follow him? They did not have their Lord's motive, how could they either understand or continue with him? Without his aim, motive or method, Christ's most loyal friends were forced into denial of him, even when they were ready to lay down their lives for his sake.

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And here is revealed the secret of the failure of many now to develop in the character of Christ. As I have said, that character is the unique fruit of Christ's religion, of his personal fellowship with God. Only as one shares Christ's aim, motive, and experience of God, is one a true Christian. Only so can one have that fellowship with Christ and God by which one's sins are overcome and one is transformed with Christ into the image of God. A true Christian is one who shares Christ's experience of God; is one whose faith in the righteousness and love of God rests upon his personal, spiritual union with God. There are many whose supposed experience of God does not commend itself by the character it has developed. Judged by its fruit it is to be avoided rather than desired. Some men, seeking union with God, have become fanatical and insane; while the so-called spiritual experiences of others have not resulted in purifying their lives. These men have not sought God with Christ's conception of Him, or with his motive for seeking Him. They have desired union with Him for selfish reasons and not in order

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that they might be qualified for larger usefulness in ministering to the world. No experience of God can prove beneficial to men except as they seek to share its fruit with others. Our debt to Christ for showing us the way to a true experience of God, with its fruit of a perfectly God-like character, is immeasurable. His service in showing us how to find God is the highest service that a man can ever render another. He has done this; he found and revealed the way to God. This is what he considered to be his great mission in the world, and he succeeded in fulfilling this mission. It thrills one's soul to write these words. Jesus of Nazareth found the only possible way to God for himself and for the world ; and at the expense of suffering and death he has forever revealed it to the world. What his experience of God on earth was, and the way he entered into it, we shall now humbly seek to make plain to all who shall read the pages of this book.

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Table Of Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Introduction ...... vii

Foreword ...... xv

Chapter I

The Kingdom of God is the religion of Jesus Christ which he experienced and preached and which finally he commanded his disciples to preach to every creature in all the world. "And it came to pass that Jesus began to preach, saying, 'Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.' "And He went throughout every city and village, preaching and shewing the glad tidings of the Kingdom of God." "Go thou, and preach the Kingdom of God," is the command of Jesus to His disciples. They were to limit all their religious teaching to the one subject of the Kingdom. In doing so they were to follow the example of their Master, who considered that his sole mission in the world was to experience and teach the Kingdom of God. It is the only message that Christ has given to the world for its salvation. So important did he regard its proclamation that when one said unto him,

"Lord, suffer me first to go bury my father," Jesus replied; "Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the Kingdom of God/' And when another said, "Lord, I will follow thee ; but let me first go and bid them farewell, which are at home in my house," Jesus said to him, "No man, having put Ins hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God."

What is this Kingdom? "The kingdom of God is not meat and drink ; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost." It is a personal relationship. ''And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the Kingdom should come, he answered them and said, "The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation : neither shall they say, Lo, here ! or, lo, there! for, behold, the Kingdom of God is within you." It is fellowship with God, for winch man was prepared from the foundation of the world, when God made him out of Himself. "Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world." (Matt. 25 : 34.)

Because God the Father and Man his son are of the same nature, both divine, the Kingdom relationship between them is possible. Jesus had this in mind, when he said, "Glorify Me with Thyself, with the glory which I had with Thee, before the world was." No one who believes in a personal God to whom man is vitally related, will question the possibility of such a relationship as the Kingdom of God. Those who deny the possibility of such a fellowship, must be prepared to deny the existence of a personal God. This Kingdom is a spiritual relationship, in which God's spirit bears witness with man's spirit. It is a direct relationship between man and God, in which no one comes between them, not even Christ himself. "Call no man father," Jesus said, meaning that no one but God should be thought of in that sacred relationship. And again, he said, "When you seek your Father, enter your closet, and close the door, so that you and He will be absolutely alone." Exclude everyone from that sacred relationship, and come directly to God as a son comes to his father. You are not to come to Him through another who is in union with Him, but immediately, and alone. It is a relationship of two, not three, of Father and son, with no one between them. It is only in such a relationship that a man is in the Kingdom of God. This Kingdom, according to the teaching of Jesus, is the vital thing in religion. Through it only, God fulfills His perfect purpose in the lives of men. It is the one chosen instrument in his hand for that purpose. It is, therefore, like the net, with which the fisherman catches his fish; like the good seed, by which the husbandman makes beautiful and fruitful his ground; like the leaven, with which the woman transforms her meal into wholesome bread. It is Christ's way of salvation for man, other than which there can be none.

This relationship is a treasure, a hidden treasure. "Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it."

Notice that the treasure of each parable is the seeker for the treasure of the other. In one case, man is the treasure, in the other, God. Taken together, the two parables represent God and man as seeking each other. These two, God and man, are the great treasures of the universe, each needing the other for his completion, neither being sufficient in himself. Apart from fellowship with God, man is valueless, there is no purpose in his existence, he would better not have been born. Apart from man, God's very existence would have no value. Very strikingly Christ emphasizes these facts in these companion parables where man is finding his value in God, and God is finding His value in man. It is only in this Kingdom that man's infinite worth is discovered and revealed, for man's value is recognized only as he is seen in his relationship to a perfect and eternal God. As the treasure of the acorn is seen only in its relationship to the oak, so the treasure in man is seen only as he is recognized as a son of God, having in him all the possibilities of God's perfection. When one thus regards man as an embodiment of God, who has put not a little of Himself, but all of Himself, into him, and has given Himself to all the ministries involved in developing and perfecting His child, then one sees that man is a treasure of infinite value.

This Kingdom of God is also a regenerating relationship. "Another parable spake He unto them, The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, until the whole was leavened." Union with God is the one natural and only possible condition of transformation into the image of God. God is the Leaven which must be in hidden, spiritual touch with man if man is to be regenerated and perfected. Personal fellowship with God leavens man. Such union enables God to give Himself increasingly to man until man is filled with all of His fullness. "Marvel not," Jesus said to Nicodemus, "that I said unto you you must be born from above."

One cannot explain the mystery of this divine union, any more than one can explain the mysteries of other fellowships; but one may be sure of the Kingdom because it is an experience and not a theory, by the fruit of which it may be known. There is no possibility of perfecting man's soul except as God dwells in him, as leaven dwells in meal. This is what Jesus means by the parable that we are considering: God must be in man, in union with his innermost soul. No faith or worship will change man into the image of God that does not result in this union of God and man, such as leaven has with the meal that it transforms. What a type of the religion of Jesus Christ as he experienced and taught it, is given us in the parable of the leaven and the meal. This, too, is the religion of Christ as St. Paul taught it when he said that he had his eye on "the high calling of God in Christ Jesus," by which he meant that he realized that God must be in him as He was in Jesus Christ, if he was to attain to the perfect righteousness of God, as Christ attained it. God must be in us as He was in Christ if we, like

Christ, are to be perfected, as God is perfect. Let us understand this fact which has been so strangely obscured in the Christian Church. Our union with God must be exactly the same as Christ's. It must be as personal as his was, and all that it meant to him it must mean to us; otherwise our union with God will never do for us what union with God did for Christ. The relationship must be the same to us if its fruit is to be the same in us. Those who make Christ's fellowship with his Father unique and peculiar take away for all others all hope of sharing its blessed fruit. Indeed they divest Christ of all power to save others. Jesus declared that his Kingdom was open to all men, that all might enjoy his relationship to the Heavenly Father. This was his Gospel, his good news of the Kingdom of God, a personal relationship of the soul to God, such as he enjoyed. If such fellowship with God as Christ had is open to all men, then all men must be divine as he was divine; must be of the God substance as fully as he was, though not at first in the same degree. All men may unite with God as Christ united with Him because all, with him, are sons of God. There is no difference between the nature of one child of God and that of all other children of God, except in degree. Human nature, apart from sin, is the divine nature, as the drop of water is the ocean and the tallow dip is the sun. The Holy Spirit and man's spirit can blend since one is the Father of the other. The Kingdom of Heaven is like leaven and meal because the Kingdom of Heaven is the union of God and man. God leavens man through fellowship with Himself, transforming him into His own perfect likeness as He imparts to him the riches of His own nature.

The Kingdom is a growing relationship, in which all the divine possibilities of man are called forth, developed, perfected.

"And he said, So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground: and should sleep, and rise night and day and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how.

"For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.

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"But when the fruit is brought forth, immediately he putteth in the sickle, because the harvest is come."

"He knoweth not how" — how union of seed and soil results in the development of the seed into all that the plant is from which it came, or how union of any imperfect man with a perfect God perfects man as God is perfect. But we have seen both of these things done — have seen the soil transform the seed into the plant and have seen fellowship with God transform a man (Christ) into the perfect likeness of God.

This growing and perfecting experience of God the least of men may have, since the least is a son of God. This is what Jesus means when he says the Kingdom of Heaven is like the least of seeds which when grown is greatest of all herbs. Glorious truth, that the least of men has in him all the possibilities of the perfect God.

"And he said, Whereunto shall we liken the kingdom of God? or with what comparison shall we compare it?

"It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when it is sown in the earth, is less than all the seeds that be in the earth: but when it is sown, it groweth up, and becometh greater than all herbs, and shooteth out great branches; so that the fowls of the air may lodge under the shadow of it."

Why does he choose the mustard seed rather than any other? Because it has greater possibilities of development than any other and thus is well fitted to illustrate the vast possibilities of development in the nature of man under the growing relationship of the Kingdom.